Welcome to Auslan Signbank

Auslan Signbank is a language resources site for Auslan (Australian Sign Language).
Auslan is the language of the deaf community in Australia. Here you will find:

a dictionary

ability to search for signs related to medical and health topics

ability to search for signs related to educational and teaching topics

videos of deaf people using the listed Auslan signs

information on the deaf community in Australia

links to Auslan classes

Users of Auslan—deaf people, deaf students, sign language interpreters, students of
Auslan, or a parents of deaf children—are invited to provide feedback to help improve the dictionary, using the links provided. Auslan is growing and changing all the time.

We apologise for the poor quality of some of the video clips and the
slow download speeds currently found in Auslan Signbank.

However, we are pleased to announce that financial support has
recently become available from the AMP Tomorrow Fund (grant to Trevor
Johnston), the Ian Potter Foundation (grant to Adam Schembri) and the
Australian Research Council (grant to Trevor Johnston and Adam Schembri) that
means we are now able to address these problems.

For example, the videos in
Auslan Signbank are being refilmed in high resolution and will be replaced between now and December 2015. They will be able to be viewed at normal speed or in slow motion. The
Auslan Signbank site (a dictionary of Auslan) is also being expanded to include
the video clips and basic mutli-media annotation files from the Auslan Corpus
(a collection of videos showing deaf Australians using Auslan as they tell
stories and have natural informal conversations).

We hope this new site will be
completed by January 2016.

We also hope to include on this site video clips of all of the examples used in the text-book on Auslan, e.g., how to make questions, statements, orders and requests, etc., (Johnston, T., & Schembri, A. 2007. Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).